With the 2025 Admitted Students Day in the rear-view mirror, 50,000 on-campus visitors over the last year and 1.4 million emails and texts sent out to prospective students, the clock ticks closer and closer to May 1, when admitted high school students will decide if they will attend Villanova University. As Villanova prepares for the Class of 2029, a profile has emerged of this class.
Matthew Harris, Executive Director of Undergraduate Admissions, explained the admissions criteria for this year’s class – a class from far and wide, composed of students involved in a variety of things both in school and with extracurriculars.
“We really look at things through the context of our university seal and [the Villanova community] has heard a lot about veritas, unitas and caritas,” Harris said. “Veritas is really the truth with their grades, their rigor and their academic performance and how they’ve challenged themselves. But then, we also shape the class with caritas and unitas as we really look to see who students are and the types of involvement they’ve had and what they’re actually doing at their high schools too. So really, all that comes into play but the academic piece is obviously the most important that we’ll look at for students.”
It also speaks to the importance of individuality for applicants, as Harris knows the importance of balance in a college class.
“We’re looking to build a community here at Villanova, it’s kind of like we’re building a small city and we don’t want to see a thousand of the same person,” Harris said. “We really like to see a whole variety of things that people do in high school, we want them to be involved in all the different ways you can be.”
This year’s number of overall applicants was a record 26,306 total applicants, 2,464 more than last year.
The target class is larger than the Class of 2028, something Harris attributes to the Cabrini campus, with 50 additional students added onto the desired class total (1,770).
“As we get ready for bringing the Cabrini campus online, we’re trying to inch up to be ready to fill the additional rooms and beds that we have over there,” Harris said. “And so the ultimate goal is going to be to add 250 students to each class. And so we’re starting towards that this year by adding 50 and then 200 for next year’s class.”
In total, the entire applicant pool were from 49 different states and 69 distinct different countries. This is a testament to the Admissions office’s desire for a diverse base of applicants and members of the Class of 2029.
Among the application pool, there were 125 different languages, six more than the Class of 2024, with the top languages spoken being English, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Russian and Arabic. It also saw 5,400 multilingual applicants. This is something Harris says makes these applicants good additions to Villanova.
“I think it does just continue to contribute to the wonderful community that we have here that people are coming from so many different backgrounds,” Harris said. “And with that comes life experiences and cultures and customs and things that help make the big world feel like a smaller place as we can all kind of learn and grow from one another and hearing about each other’s stories.”
This year also included the return of Early Admitted Students Day, which the University has not held since before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
While the experience of that and the regular ASD in April may not always be the true make-or-break moment for admitted students, Harris was both glad that the Early edition was brought back and the importance of the event (early or the typical April edition) on students making their final decision to come to Villanova.
“We were really excited to bring the Early event, we had done it for a while before COVID and then had taken a bit of a break,” Harris said. “It really is a great event, it’s a little bit more intimate and it allows for a couple multi-day for people to really dig in with the colleges and sitting in on classes and things like that. We do typically see people that come to the April event, about 80% will ultimately enroll at Villanova.”
The Class of 2029 admissions cycle also saw over half of applicants go test-optional, with 54% opting to omit their SAT or ACT. Previous statements indicated Villanova would remain test-optional only through 2026, but Harris left the option open.
“We’ve really gotten to the point now where the graduating seniors are the first group that were able to apply test-optional,” Harris said. “We’re really able to finally research and see exactly how they did in terms of retention, in terms of graduation rates, GPAs and now anyone who’s taken a professional exam, we’ll see how they score on those at the end of this year. And so, we’re kind of holding a little bit, just to see how all those go.”
When asked to describe the Class of 2029 in three words, Harris said this class of admitted students are “academically-gifted, doers and socially-conscious.”
Despite the record numbers, this admissions process was also an emotional one for Harris and the entire undergraduate admissions staff. This was the first cycle in over 40 years, since 1981, without his predecessor, Michael Gaynor, at the helm after Gaynor’s passing last August.
“I think Michael has left a long shadow over this office and we’ve tried to model everything we do this year in the way Michael would have done it,” Harris said. “We’ve been giving him credit for the record number of applications, he’s been overseeing things from above. And so, I think that really it was the year that we wanted to make sure we honored him in all the ways we could, so we wanted to be as successful as it could be.”
